This is a story I started here a few years ago and did not far on for scheduling reasons -- my schedule the past few years not being ideal for any serious creative endeavors, for a number of reasons. But it would be a pity to leave it at that, particularly since I have had most of the story in my head for quite some time. I have also not been quite satisfied by the order in which I did things originally, so this gives a chance to rework it.
Chapter One: Fire Serpent Hall Receives Visiting Gods
The Hall of the Fire Serpent was unusually busy. For most of the past five years, only Tera Three-Tery and her uncle, Llew Seven-Klevy Fire Serpent, had actually lived at the Hall. A few others, none of them gods, had come and gone with some regularity, but none of them even stayed overnight. For nearly a thousand years before Tera had come to live there, only Uncle Llew had lived there. He was known throughout the realm of Mizur as an unusually reclusive god. Gods who looked after other realms were known for having busy palaces with elaborate dinners and bright galas and never-ending entertainments, but not Uncle Llew. He would venture forth every so often on matters of business and then return to the Hall, seen on a regular basis only by the very few who brought supplies or were hired to prevent mischief in the woods below. Truth to be told, the people of Mizur liked this feature of their god. A Mizuran proverb had it that a god who meddles rarely is the most helpful of the gods.
Tera herself was not particularly pleased with the sudden appearance of people. It meant that she constantly had to field timid questions from servants about whether she approved of their placement of the tapestries or the rugs or the flowers. Uncle Llew never had to answer such questions. He would walk into the room, and suddenly everyone would be busy with the chore that they had just decided was not quite finished. When he left, they would come to Tera with their questions. She had grown used to the relative quiet and seclusion of Fire Serpent Hall, which gave her plenty of time to go on walks or read a book in the library or explore the sprawling building, or converse with Uncle Llew over a meal that he usually cooked himself. She had been raised and trained as a Goddess-Princess in the realm of Davir, with throngs of servants around her, so the new situation was also uncomfortably like being a little girl again.
Because of this, she was often reminded of her first meeting with Uncle Llew, when she was twelve years old. Growing up as Goddess-Princess of Davir, she had vaguely known that her mother had a brother. At some point (she did not know when) she had learned his name was Llew, but other than that, she had known nothing about him. Then the terrible time had come, her mother's death, and she had found herself standing in a cold courtyard as Llew's chariot descended from the heavens. She felt dark and numb and slightly bitter inside. The hatch on the chariot opened, and Llew had stepped forth. It was a strange moment. Despite never having seen him, she recognized him immediately. He looked very much like her mother. The sight of him was like a sharp spear to the heart.
Tera's father, the king of Davir, stepped forward, welcoming Llew (calling him "Your Splendor," which before she had only ever heard addressed to her mother) and introducing him to Tera. Llew politely acknowledged her, then said to her father, "I will need to see her immediately."
Llew was taken into the room where her mother's body lay, covered in a fine cloth. He pulled back the cloth, and it was at that moment, for the first time, that Tera felt that she and Uncle Llew were on the same side. His face crumpled almost immediately, and he sighed, shaking his head, saying, "She was so young." She knew exactly how he felt. He had proceeded to examine the body. At the time she had not known what he was doing, although now she knew he was carefully examining its possibilities. Tera and the king and the rest of the court waited in silence as he did so. Finally Llew raised his head and said in a voice he tried and could not quite succeed in keeping bland, "I can confirm that it was from natural causes."
He sighed again, looked at Tera a moment, then asked her father, "Does the girl know yet?"
The king shook his head. "No, Your Splendor."
Llew looked off into the distance a moment, then said, "I should see my sister's room and her effects. I recommend you take the opportunity of the time."
Then Llew went off to look through her mother's possessions, while her father stood there awkwardly with her. She had always been closer to her mother. As king, he was always busy and often away, and when he was not, it was still awkward, because as Goddess-Princess she outranked him. He was always impeccable in his courtesy, and she did not at all doubt that he had some warmth for her, but their states of life put them at infinite distance from each other, separated by the unbridgeable social chasm between Vilim and Davnan, man and god.
"I am afraid we will be parting soon," he said to her. "Your uncle will take you to Mizur for training as a goddess. Now that your mother is gone, no one here can do that."
"Can I come back to visit?" she had asked.
"Of course," he said. "You will always be the Goddess-Princess of Davir." But the tone of his voice and the sad smile with which he said this suggested that he did not think she would return any time soon.
And that was that; they said no more on the subject, and he went off to look after the complicated matters that arise when a god visits. That evening, however, the Minister of the Right Hand had come to her, saying, "Your Glory, His Splendor wishes to speak with you in the morning hall."
The morning hall was a small side hall in the palace, with a marble floor and a fireplace. They had set a table in the middle of it, at which Llew sat, looking listlessly over what seemed an account book. When he saw her, however, he put the book away and stood, smiling, gesturing to another chair at the table.
When they were both seated, he said to her, "They tell me that you have a talent for finding things. Is that true?"
"I suppose so," she said.
"When you find something, what is it like?" She did not understand the question, and he followed with, "What do you do when you find something?"
She spread her hands. "I just look where it is most likely to be found. That is all."
Llew smiled slightly and sat back in his chair. "It is more than that, though, is it not? You can find things that no one else can. Your father mentioned that you once found a room that no one knew was there, long hidden by construction years ago. How did you do that?"
"It just seemed like there should be a door where the wall was," she said.
"But they had to open up the wall to find the door. You could tell it was there when no one else could." She acknowledged it, and he went on. "Our family has a gift for seeing the ways things can be. All the Davnan have it to some degree, but we have always excelled." He sat forward, his elbows on the table and his hands clasped just under his chin. "Can you tell the difference between me and everyone else?"
"Yes," said Tera. "You seem less flat and things seem to change around you, like a light, except that it's not visible in the way light is."
He nodded. "That is it exactly. Do you see it all the time, or just when you concentrate?"
"All the time."
"Interesting," he said, half to himself. Then to her: "That suggests that you have a particular gift for seeing the ways living things can be."
He pulled a coin out of some pocket or other and showed it to her. "This is an ordinary coin," he said. He placed it on the table. "This coin has endlessly many possibilities. It is here, but it can be anywhere in the universe. All locations are possible to every physical object; that is why they are locations." He moved it with his finger. "When it moves, its possibilities in a sense remain the same; it can be anywhere in the universe. But as it moves, some possibilities are more available, and this changes as it moves. This is the fundamental principle of the art of the Davnan: Everything is possible, but possibilities are not equally available."
He took his finger off the coin, but it continued to move in a slow, leminiscate motion. "The coin can be anywhere, but it is most easily where it is, and then a little less easily in the places right around it, the places you could move it to with a little nudge of the finger. It could also be elsewhere." He tapped the coin and it disappeared -- or rather, it first was there in the center of the table and then it was on the edge of the table. "In the ordinary course of things, those are not as available." He tapped it again, and it was back in the center, moving in its figure-eight. "But we Davnan have a natural ability that lets us shift how available different possibilities are. On a very small scale, we do it naturally, effortlessly, instinctually. You have probably done it without realizing it; things become a little easier to move, a little easier to carry, a little easier to see or hear, than they would likely have done on their own. It is our fundamental difference from the Vilim; we carry our luck with us. With practice, we can do much more. And when you are old enough, you will be Enrolled on the Manifest and have access to the Oracle, which lets you be more precise, and to the Engine and the Vaults, which let you act on an even greater scale."
The coin on the table stopped moving, and Uncle Llew looked very grave. "Shifting possibilities comes with a cost. You cannot make one possibility more available without making other possibilities less available, and it is not an equal exchange. Make this possibility a little nearer and another possibility becomes much more distant. I could make things appear from nowhere with the wave of my hand. That is something that is possible. But by making such a distant possibility very available, many possibilities would have to become very distant and hard to reach. If I snapped my finger and made a coin appear, and did not know what I was doing, I might accidentally reduce all the available possibilities of this table, or this palace, or everyone in it, or my own body. They would crumble into dust, which is capable of little more than being dust, and then, beyond that, would burn away into heat."
Tera had looked at her hands. "You are telling me why I need to go with you."
Uncle Llew nodded. "Yes, particularly at your age. You are entering what my mother called the Hard Years; your ability to shift possibilities will increase rapidly, but your sense of your limits is still not very well defined. During that time, you are a danger to yourself and others, unless there is someone who can guide you through it. I am very sorry about it," he said sympathetically, "but you cannot stay here. Things will be different in a few years, when you are trained enough to be Enrolled."
They had left Davir the next day, and she had not yet returned.
It had been a quiet life, due to Uncle Llew's reclusive ways. It had all begun to change at breakfast shortly after her seventeenth birthday, when Uncle Llew had suddenly said, "I was thinking that at the end of the summer we should visit The City."
"Mizan Vir, you mean?" she replied.
"No, not any Vilim city," said Uncle Llew. 'Vilim' was the word used by the gods for a non-god. "They hardly count as cities. I mean The City." He meant The City of the Gods; for some reason, Uncle Llew rarely used the term 'god', and when he did it was generally with an undertone of sarcasm or contempt, the explanation for which Tera had never been able to coax out of him. He would more often use the gods' own name for their kind, Davnan, or just avoid it entirely.
"I would love that," she said. "Is there any particular reason why?"
Uncle Llew looked thoughtful for a moment, frowning in the direction of an empty corner of the breakfast room, snapping his fingers absentmindedly as he sometimes did when deep in thought, then said, "When you turn nineteen, we will have to visit anyway, for your Enrollment on the Manifest," he said, "but it would be better for that not to be your first time in The City."
He was silent a long moment, then he said, "As far as lore and skill are concerned, all the things that go with being Davnan, I have tried to catch you up, and you have done well. But there is one great gap in your education, which is how to navigate the treacheries of Davnan society. Davnan life is all about the clan; you will need to meet other members of the Embiadwei clan and get to know them. And to be wholly honest, your mother and I did not leave The City on good terms with the others, and I have been thinking of what you might have to endure because of our decisions. You will need allies."
"I would love to meet others in our clan," said Tera. It was true; her heart was thrilling and her imagination fired by the thought.
Uncle Llew looked at her drily. "You think you would love to meet our kin," he said. "They are all treacherous, I warn you. Half of Davnan politics is the fine art of stabbing people in the back while you embrace them. Constant vigilance is the only defense."
They ate for a while. Uncle Llew had, as usual, cooked the breakfast, and Uncle Llew's breakfasts were excellent. All his meals were, which is perhaps not surprising, since he was a god.
"You rarely talk about The City of the Gods," she said eventually. "Do you miss it?"
He stared off into the empty corner again. "I suppose in an abstract way I'm curious to see the family estate again; but no, I do not miss it. The City and I parted for good a long time ago. And the people I especially do not look forward to seeing again." His eyes turned back to her and smiled. "But those are the results of my decisions, not yours. You should have the opportunity to see what you can get out of clan and City."
The conversation on that day had turned to the less interesting topic of her studies for the week, but a few weeks later, this time at lunch, Uncle Llew said, "We are going to have Davnan as guests at the end of Sery." That put the time just five weeks away. Tera was immensely surprised, since they had never had gods as guests before, and said so.
"Well," said Uncle Llew, "since we are going to The City, it would be good to get a practice run, so to speak. So I've arranged for a brief visit." He wagged his finger at her. "You'll have to be on your best behavior. If you don't like them, or they don't like you, at least we tried, but the best possible result would be to make a good impression."
"Are they from the Embiadwei clan?"
"No," said Uncle Llew slowly, as if he were measuring his words. "We will meet plenty of Embiadwei when we reach The City. The Embiadwei are not a concern; they are unreliable, but they will support and protect you in their own way, because you are clan. But you will need allies from other clans, or, at least, members of other clans who have an incentive not to destroy you. Manawydan and Rhiannon are both Wenovar clan. The Wenovar -- let us say that the Wenovar have more than a few grudges against me." He did not seem concerned by this. "Most of them hate me with a passionate hatred, in fact, and again, I am sorry that you will have to deal with that. But we will have to start taking steps to mitigate that. And treacherous Wenovar they may be, but at least a thousand years ago, Manawydan and Rhiannon were among the most reasonable of their clan. That they accepted the invitation is also a good sign. They will be coming with their son, whom I've never met, but is about your age."
All of Uncle Llew's insinuations about the dark agendas of the clans filled Tera with some trepidation. "Uncle Llew, do we really need to do this?"
"Yes," he had said firmly. "I am currently making arrangements to get us a full staff; anything less might be taken as an insult. And we obviously cannot have the staff just show up, so we will need to have them a couple of weeks before so that everything runs smoothly on the day."
So here she was, constantly interrupted, fielding questions from shy servants who then fled away like deer from the hunter. She grew uneasy in the stomach as the day drew near, constantly wondering what these gods would be like, from this strange Wenovar clan that apparently hated the good-natured Uncle Llew. The worst of it was that she couldn't complain about any of it to Uncle Llew, as she normally would, because now there were always servants around, at breakfast, lunch, tea, and dinner, and all the times in between. She called on her training and patiently answered all questions. She tried as best she could to put the servants at ease so that they would not scurry around like mice afraid of the cat. All of these new servants had been borrowed from various noble families and wealthy merchant houses throughout Mizur. They were supposed to be all volunteers, but given that the noble families and merchant houses certainly wanted to curry favor with Uncle Llew, Tera doubted whether the volunteering was always entirely voluntary. She did not want to make life harder for them than it might already be, so she tried to be kind to them. But she was uneasy, and wished it all would be over.
Finally the day came. At about noon the mirror in the hallway spoke. Tera had known that it could -- it had always just seemed to her as if it could -- but she had never actually heard it. "We apologize, but business that needed to be finished before our departure took longer than expected. We will be arriving in exactly four hours, and thank you again for the invitation."
After that, everything in the Hall was a flurry as everyone prepared for the visiting gods finally to arrive. Almost everything had already been done but, as often happens, the looming of a deadline threw everyone into chaos. Now that there was an exact time of arrival, everyone went over everything again to make sure that things were perfect. Uncle Llew went from room to room, issuing directions for any modifications he deemed fit. Finally he and Tera stood in the welcoming hall. All the lights were lit, there were new tapestries on the wall showing his heraldic name, Fire Serpent, in red and gold. There were beautiful bushes in planters along the walls, blooming with red and yellow flowers.
Llew looked around. "It lacks something." He said and did nothing else, at least outwardly, but Tera sensed the possibilities of the room shifting, the improbable becoming certain, and all of a sudden the lights were brighter, the colors on the tapestries were more vivid, and, more marvelously, the bushes all were taller and even more full of flowers. It was work of a kind only the gods can do, done beautifully and elegantly, as all of Uncle Llew's shiftings were. It was also very subtle, because there were aspects of what he did with the possibilities that Tera could not quite see or feel. It seemed magical even to her. In her mind, she filed away a note to ask him more about it.
The guests arrived exactly four hours after their message. Standing slightly behind Uncle Llew, she had a good view of all three of them. In all her life, she had only met two gods before, if she did not count herself: her mother and her uncle. Both of them (unlike herself, she often felt) looked like gods. They were not quite beautiful, at least by the Davir standards of beauty with which she had grown up, but such Vilim standards do not matter. They had instead both always been very striking to see: golden-blond hair that smoothly waved here and there, dark blue eyes that always seemed to be looking past everything they saw, golden-honey-tanned skin, slimness of build, facial features that were delicate in a way that suggested a certain hauteur. You could imagine them as members of some strange ethereal race looking haughtily down on the lesser beings around them. In Uncle Llew, all this was accentuated now by his formal robes, which were blazing red with golden trim, his emblem-name blazoned on his chest. Tera had always assumed that this was just what gods were supposed to look like. But the guests looked nothing like that at all. They looked quite bland and ordinary. They were not striking at all. There was an older man, slightly stout, with brown hair. The woman had magnificent black hair that reached nearly all the way down her back but in all other respects was quite the ordinary matron. The young man standing slightly behind them, obviously their son, fared a little better, since unlike either of his parents he was handsome, at least in the awkward way teenaged boys often are, like a man still under construction. However, he looked fully as uncomfortable in his formal robes as she felt, and so also not much like a god.
All of this makes it sound as if Tera's primary impression of them was derived from their physical appearance, but this is not right. She took it all in at a glance, and it contributed to the overall impression, but what primarily disappointed her was that they looked, as she would have described it, 'flat and slow'. What had always been most striking about her mother was that she seemed more real than anything else around her, as if she were the only fully rounded object in a world drawn on paper. The possibilities of the world seemed to whirl swiftly around and in and through her in a way that made her stand out. Uncle Llew had the same flurry of possibilities, and perhaps to an even greater degree than her mother. But the three guests were flat in comparison. They were more rounded than the servants, who were flatter and slower; but the possibilities moving in and through and around them still moved in slow, lazy swings.
But she filed all of this away, too, because formal introductions were being done. The gods have several names: a given name, a date-name that indicates the date of their birth, and an emblem-name that they get once they are Enrolled. Tera's mother's name had been Arianrhod Seven-Klevy Metal Sun; her uncle's name was Llew Seven-Klevy Fire Serpent. Her own date-name was Three-Tery; she was not yet Enrolled, so she had no emblem-name yet. Except when distinguishing people with the name, the date-name was rarely used and the emblem-name used mostly for heraldic purposes, but they were all used in formal introductions. Despite the fact that the gods were her own people, Tera was used to the naming customs of Davir and Mizur, and she still thought the formal names of the gods strange.
The older man's full name was Manawydan Thirteen-Suly Wood Cougar; the woman's name was Rhiannon Fifteen-Mury Wood River; their son's name was Rhys Nine-Suly Wind Eagle.
Rhiannon beamed at her when Uncle Llew introduced her. "Your mother and I grew up together," she said, "and you look so very much like her."
Tera took that as a lie of courtesy, but she returned it with gracious acknowledgement. They all withdrew to the receiving room for conversation and light refreshments.
The conversation was nothing to which she could contribute. It consisted entirely of comments about people and places in The City of the Gods, none of which she knew. It was for the most part quite dull. That this was not purely a failing on her part was visible in Rhys's face, which also showed signs of boredom. Nonetheless there was something happening in the conversation that she could not quite follow. Every so often there would be a sudden moment of awkwardness. For example, early on in the discussion, Uncle Llew remarked that he had asked the Embiadwe clan to make sure that the family estate of Brickanbreck would be fit and furnished for their visit.
"Yes," said Rhiannon brightly. "We regularly see them working on it and bringing in new furnishings."
"You must live quite close, then," said Uncle Llew somewhat puzzled.
"Yes, we live by the lake down and around the way, at Abernant."
Uncle Llew, who had been raising a cracker topped with something to his mouth, paused. "That used to be a Muriaki estate."
This was where the first awkward moment occurred. Rhiannon and Manawydan looked at each other, then, Manawydan said, as if measuring his words very carefully, "Yes, that is different, I suppose. It has been Wenovar for nearly a thousand years. A number of families moved off Wenovar Mountain, and some estates were traded around because of it. Since my father belonged to the Muriaki, we received Abernant. Not in the clan, but still in the family, so to speak."
Uncle Llew stared at and through his cracker a moment. Then, recollecting himself, he said, "My father was also Muriaki; I spent many a boyhood day at Abernant, swimming in the lake. There was a large rock not far from the shore, a bit to the north, that had excellent fishing in those days."
At this comment the awkwardness passed. "Yes," said Manawydan, "it still does. I fish there regularly."
Then all the conversation for the next twenty minutes was fishing spots and the various mountain lakes in The City of the Gods. Tera gained nothing from this long, slow, rambling conversation, beyond the impression that The City of the Gods must be simply immense, since it seemed to include an endless number of mountains and infinitely many bodies of water. But similar awkward moments arose several more times, often at places in the conversation that seemed entirely random to Tera.
The guests went to their rooms to prepare for dinner, and then they had dinner and the conversation was very much like it had been before, except now it was interspersed with comments about the food. Tera couldn't contribute much to this, either. The food was good, but far inferior to Uncle Llew's cooking, and it seemed to her that it would be rude to the servants, who were after all trying their best, to say this. It was not their fault that they could not cook like a god.
After dinner, Uncle Llew said charmingly to Manawydan and Rhiannon, "I fear we are boring the younger ones with our reminiscences. I suggest that we continue over dessert wines and rum in the parlor, and Tera can give Rhys a tour of the gardens." They both agreed. Tera found something rather suspicious about the alacrity with which Rhiannon agreed, although she could not quite place why, nor say quite what it was of which she was suspicious, but it did not matter one way or another, since neither Tera nor Rhys could in politeness refuse.
It was a nice late afternoon, and Uncle Llew had earlier brought the garden to a peak of picturesque loveliness; every flower was as beautiful as it possibly could be, every stone was improbably striking. Because she felt it would be rude to walk in silence, she made a few comments about the garden and asked a few questions about Rhys's interests. One of these questions must have been the right one to ask, because he became voluble in discussing metalworking. Tera knew far less than he did about the subject; her background as a Goddess-Princess had of course involved no training at all in metalworking, and while Uncle Llew had tried valiantly to teach her how to shift the possibilities of metals, the lessons had taken their place near the top of the list of lessons she liked least. For the most part, she made noncommittal comments in response to his metallurgical enthusiasm and imagined that he probably thought her somewhat stupid. At least once, though, she knew she had said something right. He had been talking about some difficult project on which he was working and mentioned that it used nickel. She had responded that she hated nickel because it was like working with rock-hard butter, and she could actually see his estimation of her rising considerably. She did not know why.
They came to a graceful bridge over a babbling brook, where they stopped and quietly looked down at the water for a while. Then a somewhat curious looking came over Rhys's face and he turned to her with a smile. Tera might almost have called it sly and mischievous, almost as if he were deliberately deciding to do something he had been explicitly told not to do. Somehow it made his handsome face rather handsomer.
"Tell me," he said, "because I have to know. What is it like living with The Terror of the Gods?"
She stared at him. Then she said, "Do you mean Uncle Llew? What could possibly be terrifying about him? Why would you call him that?"
Rhys looked at her a moment, apparently disappointed in the answer. Then he turned and looked back down at the water. "I do not know the details, myself. No one seems to like to speak about it. Other gods have been talking with my parents about this visit, and they sometimes call your uncle the Terror, the Destroyer, the Monster, the Burner, and some other things. I get the sense that there was some great quarrel, about a thousand years ago, and it went badly for everyone. I did hear once," Rhys said confidentially, "that your uncle set Wenovar Mountain in The City of the Gods on fire." He shook his head. "But again, nobody seems to want to talk about it."
"I know nothing at all about it," said Tera. "Uncle Llew seems to me to be very un-terrifying."
They were silent some moments, then Rhys asked her some questions about her own interests, and they walked back to the house, talking about various trivial problems that arose whenever you tried to shift the possibilities of flowers.
Rhiannon and Manawydan and Rhys spent the night in the guest rooms, and were seen off in the early morning, Rhiannon insisting that Llew and Tera come to visit them at some point.
"That seems to have gone well," said Uncle Llew afterward, "at least as far as I could tell. How about you?"
She agreed, but told him about Rhys's comments at the bridge.
"Hmm," said Uncle Llew, "I suppose that is not surprising." But he would answer no more questions and went down below to his workshop.
to be continued